7 ms·

We're going from cold war to all-in. Not just a privacy question. Reddit nags me every time I hit the front page, even returning from a story, asking me to log

by narag 9y ago

We're going from cold war to all-in. Not just a privacy question. Reddit nags me every time I hit the front page, even returning from a story, asking me to log in. For most sites I need to create ublock filters to prevent pop-ups with useless "we use cookies", subscription requests, ads or social media bars that fills half the screen, etc. etc. etc. Every newspaper I read has decided that autostarting video and streaming is a good idea. Yes, HN is OK, but sites that it points to are not. I'm giving up on the web.

kfrzcode 9y ago
> I'm giving up on the web They said, while posting on a web forum
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ttctciyf 9y ago
  > a web forum which, to be fair, is accessible via numerous 3rd party apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14684105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14684105
jackgolding 9y ago
When you mentioned reddit I thought you were talking about their "install the app" pop up. They have by far the worst mobile experience out of any site I've use more than once in the last 2 years.
- Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
  LinkedIn are ever so slightly worse. But it's tight.
  - briandear 9y ago
    LinkedIn absolutely “wins” when it comes to a sucky mobile web experience.
- dkasper 9y ago
  Fortunately it takes one tap to update your preference to have it stop nagging you to install the app. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/6hk9ot/androiddear_reddit_no_i_do_not_want_your_app_stop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/6hk9ot/androi...
  - droopybuns 9y ago
    Thank you! Helpful tip!
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    No, it does not. I browse Reddit on mobile in Incognito mode in Chrome, frequently, for various reasons. This means that there is no cookie history, and (when Chrome shits its pants and dumps the Incognito session), the settings are lost. This seems to occur every few days, occasionally every few hours. Reminds me a lot of Netscape 4 days. Every. Fucking. Goddamned. Time. I go to Reddit, I get: 1. The "Use our Mobile fuckwitted app" fucking nag screen. 2. I have to disable that fucking nag. 3. I have to select "use Desktop". (Chrome's own "use Desktop site" option isn't sticky across sessions, or even tabs, AFAICT, when selected on a site-by-site basis.) And I'm finally where the fuck I wanted to be in the first fucking place. I maintain a small but fairly well-received sub, and moderate a few others. For numerous reasons, these haven't taken off or succeeded in generating much by way of active discussion (Reddit has long been an exemplar of how to design site mechanics to fully kill and destroy any active conversation). Mind, that's a hotly-contested field, but for all it does vaguely well (and yes, Reddit does have some nice features and a large and not entirely useless community), there are a few small things that could be changed to improve this ... which manifestly haven't happened. Another site I criticise heavily, Google+, actually does this fairly well, given a number of preconditions. 1. The discussion has to be actively and effectively moderated. 2. There's got to be a good, and not overly-large, discussion cohort. I find ~5-10 people is a minimum (with the right 5-10), and in rare cases, up to a few thousand probably an upper bound. The most lively conversation I saw was in a private community of about 50 people, tightly monitored for behaviour but not (with a few bounds) content. 3. The fact that a discussion stays live for an extended period of time and the Notifications loop back earlier participants is key. 4. Individual discussions can only run to 500 comments. This keeps things from running on too long. 5. Discussion is flat, not threaded. This isn't my initial choice, but it actually works ... fairly well. I'd ultimately prefer client-based determination of order, much as with Usenet or decent email (that is: Mutt) clients, including threads.[1] I'm not saying G+ is great. It has many, many, many flaws. But it is the best general-use system I've found on today's Internet, despite my many reasons for wishing that weren't the case. I've found and met some great people, and had really good conversations, many lasting days and weeks, more than a few months and years. And no, not all discussions go well. One of the best hosts on the site is its former chief architect, Yonatan Zunger. And even he has increasingly had to shut down discussions that ended up as shitshows. See: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cnqAekPSFgB https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cnqAekPSFgB The fact that Google doesn't have to crank up impressions on the service for advertising dosh probably helps. The other games the company's played for generating activity stats have quite negatively impacted it in many peoples' eyes, my own included. The G+/YouTube fiasco being the worst.[2] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Mutt offers: threaded, date, sender, and subject sorts, reversible ordering, and extensive filtering, including the ability to arbitrarily tag items and view only those. It remains hands down the best messaging tool I've ever used, though I find email almost entirely untractable for other reasons these days. 2. This ended up with the three top stories on HN on that date being either items I'd posted elsewhere being submitted here, or related fairly directly to those. Interesting experience. http://imgur.com/YgEjUuI http://imgur.com/YgEjUuI https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-16 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-16
- mwambua 9y ago
  Instagram's mobile site gives Reddit a good run for its money. It recently just stopped working for me... Chrome throws a "Too many redirects".
- brandmeyer 9y ago
  There are at least two mobile reddit interfaces, and one of them does not do this popup junk. The other one is obtained by adding the /.compact suffix, like https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact
  - 333c 9y ago
    This same interface is accessible at i.reddit.com, for example, https://i.reddit.com/r/programming/ https://i.reddit.com/r/programming/
  - Accacin 9y ago
    That's great when you want to browse Reddit, but often I find Reddit an actual good source for information so I'll click the link from the search engine that then takes me to the "real mobile version" which has the popup.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ according to comments works for this specific purpose. Haven't used it myself. I was hoping ublock did it but doesn't appear to. If i.reddit.com is a different IP then a hosts file entry might do it. Does pi-hole do this?
- pacala 9y ago
  Twitter mobile. Scroll down for a screen, full page "Log in/Sign up" popup. Every single page.
  - netsharc 9y ago
    Tragically, this is most probably by design, to encourage sign-ups. Whoever implemented that should not feel any better than a telemarketer or a spammer.
    - ttctciyf 9y ago
      And then when you decide to create a sacrificial account just to keep them happy, they won't let you unless you give them your mobile number...
- snailmailman 9y ago
  i hate the fact that sometimes it says "continue to the mobile site" and sometimes it says "login to access the mobile site". I prefer to not be logged in. Sometimes when i visit reddit it refuses to let me use their site logged out. Its super inconsistent. When I can't use the site logged out i just give up. Also sometimes now the location of the "n comments" button becomes a "share" button, with the comments moved over to the side. but again, only sometimes. I keep clicking share on accident, because it happens infrequently enough that I haven't learned to check. I've started switching to using their .compact site, which has neither problem. Only a small "switch to the new mobile site" button at the top of the page. The thumbnails aren't as large but thats fine with me
- retube 9y ago
  yeah their official mobile site design is just awful. This much better tho: www.reddit.com/.compact
_jal 9y ago
It is super rude, and "giving up" is the right answer - to annoying sites. Screw them. The single nicest thing you can do for yourself after an ad blocker is to get Javascript under control. I personally am using JS Blocker, which takes too much effort, but allows you to selectively load JS. There are others - I like the control JS Blocker offers, but it is a bit annoying. This is not without problems; there are sites that don't work/don't work well. I frankly don't care about most of them, so that's fine with me, and I leak much less data to the various panty-sniffers[1]. Life is much nicer when you take back control of what runs on your machine. [1] I block FB, Google and several others' IP space, but the smaller adtech/government/who-knows surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with, and, well, defense-in-depth is the way to go.
- jdironman 9y ago
  How about just whitelist the good guys?
  - bmurphy1976 9y ago
    That's what I do on Android, except I use Brave instead of Chrome/Firefox. I change the default settings to block all JavaScript by default, and then use the Brave button to whitelist sites I trust and actually want to use. Browsing the web (especially news sites) on my Android has gone from "a complete nightmare" to "tolerable" because of this.
    - freedomben 9y ago
      Me too. Brave gave me back the ability to browse the web on mobile. Now if I could just force pages to load in Brave instead of web view, that'd be amazing. Related tip: if you open the Google app, menu -> settings -> Accounts & privacy -> disable Open web pages in the Google app, that will fix it for google now links.
    - ttctciyf 9y ago
      Same approach, but I prefer firefox beta + noscript, which allows more fine-grained control (so I can permanently or temporarily enable js from e.g. reddit.com and redditstatic.com, but not googletagservices, amazon-adsystem, etc. .. on the same page.)
n42 9y ago
until you mentioned this I forgot reddit started doing this. at one point, I wasn't even given the option to dismiss the login modal. I had to either login or not use reddit. these ublock origin rules ended that: www.reddit.com##.splash-design www.reddit.com##.modal-open:style(overflow: visible !important)
teirce 9y ago
Also: after years of reddit not caring about email addresses, it will now nag me every time I log in to verify my email address.
cfadvan 9y ago
Giving up on Reddit is just the same response to stimulus, but the web is vast and varied. You’re giving up on a lot of good to spite a lot of bad, but you’re just going to hurt yourself. Use uNlock and uMatrix and after a few days of regular surfing and a little tweaking you won’t even realize that shite is still there.
- pista 9y ago
  Giving it up for work is not possible. But for entertainment it's different the gp not only mentions Reddit, but other news sites and specifically the ones linked from HN. It's a general trend that almost everybody does, probably because "everybody is doing it". There are good alternatives like reading books, watching movies or going out. Web sites are shooting themselves in their feet. Blockers end up being too much work with this arms race. They think they're "winning" when they're actually just selecting the people that can't choose.
  - ttctciyf 9y ago
    I regularly browse HN and click through to articles. I run firefox / noscript on both mobile and desktop. I occasionally have to enable or temp-enable some stuff in noscript to be able to read articles, but it's a small minority of cases, and probably smaller if I wasn't so prone to temp-enabling rather than enabling. For sessions where I know I want js to "just work", like online shopping from a set of presumed-trustworthy sites, I use a different browser profile without privacy extensions, but I use it just for those purposes and avoid general browsing with it. To make multi-profile browsing simple, I theme the profiles differently, so it's obvious which one I'm in. On desktop, my launcher for firefox does --ProfileManager --new-instance and on mobile I just use different firefoxes - ff-beta and ff itself. Is this "too much work?" - I can see how it might look like that, but I've been using this system for a few years, and though it takes a few minutes to set up on a new system or device the maintenance overhead is low, so I'd say it's not "too much." Also, the time gained not waiting for js-encrusted sites to load probably outweighs the setup/maintenance by a considerable factor.
    - 9y ago
ams6110 9y ago
> Every newspaper I read has decided that autostarting video and streaming is a good idea. If you're using Firefox, go to about:config and set media.autoplay.enabled to false.
keyle 9y ago
"We use cookies on this site! Read our Cookie-policy mambo jumbo here! <dismiss>"
- tempestn 9y ago
  Blame the stupid EU cookie law for that though, not the sites. Cookies can actually be very user/privacy friendly, since they provide a way to retain user preferences without requiring an account to tie them to.
  - fwn 9y ago
    They are also entirely voluntary - which the EU would've known if decision makers had visited their browser settings once.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      The notice is only for cookies used for non-essential tasks (like analytics) and doesn't have to be shown for things like login sessions. Your browser can't distinguish between those.
      - fwn 9y ago
        The cookie notice policy led to the worst imaginable actual outcome: A state in which you either accept cookies (incl. third party) by default or you will be haunted by numbing "reminders" that cookies exist. Usually taking large parts of your small screen estate. Prior to that you could just disable them if you liked. One can say that policy makers had good intentions - certainly. However, I can not imagine a valid evaluation that wouldn't conclude this policy as failure.
        icebraining 9y ago
        I don't disagree that the policy was a failure, I just disagree with your specific point made in the previous post.
suprfnk 9y ago
> autostarting video and streaming Super annoying. In Firefox in about:config, you can set: media.autoplay.enabled to false. That works well for me.
- cornholio 9y ago
  A similar setting exists in chrome where you can mute all tabs by default and only whitelist a limited number.
- pista 9y ago
  Some sites are using js tricks to override this setting.
LudoA 9y ago
The extension "I don't care about cookies" prevents 99% of the useless "we use cookies" pop-ups.
HugoDaniel 9y ago
You do know that this is not a "web problem". Just spend 10 minutes with your average 13yr old and see how many times they get bombed in the face with one of those interstitial ads. Also it is easier to root your phone with a malicious app than with a web page. Heck, if you are an app developer why even bother to root phones when you can just do whatever you want, after all if the user does not give you all-in permissions you won't even let the app run.
- noway421 9y ago
  AFAIK this is against guidelines and the app shouldn't be approved in the App Store. Not sure about Google Play
ttctciyf 9y ago
I sometimes use reddit with Firefox for Android (beta, equipped with noscript and ublock origin) and it's really not too bad like that. But overall I get a much better experience using the free, open, 3rd party app Slide ( https://www.reddit.com/r/slideforreddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slideforreddit/ ) so, maybe give that a try? (Assuming you're on Android - ios, I've no idea.)
juststeve 9y ago
no don't give up. just be in the vocal minority that gives a shit and expects better.

by narag 9y ago

kfrzcode 9y ago

> I'm giving up on the web They said, while posting on a web forum

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ttctciyf 9y ago
> a web forum which, to be fair, is accessible via numerous 3rd party apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14684105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14684105

jackgolding 9y ago

When you mentioned reddit I thought you were talking about their "install the app" pop up. They have by far the worst mobile experience out of any site I've use more than once in the last 2 years.

Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
LinkedIn are ever so slightly worse. But it's tight.
- briandear 9y ago
  LinkedIn absolutely “wins” when it comes to a sucky mobile web experience.
dkasper 9y ago
Fortunately it takes one tap to update your preference to have it stop nagging you to install the app. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/6hk9ot/androiddear_reddit_no_i_do_not_want_your_app_stop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/6hk9ot/androi...
- droopybuns 9y ago
  Thank you! Helpful tip!
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  No, it does not. I browse Reddit on mobile in Incognito mode in Chrome, frequently, for various reasons. This means that there is no cookie history, and (when Chrome shits its pants and dumps the Incognito session), the settings are lost. This seems to occur every few days, occasionally every few hours. Reminds me a lot of Netscape 4 days. Every. Fucking. Goddamned. Time. I go to Reddit, I get: 1. The "Use our Mobile fuckwitted app" fucking nag screen. 2. I have to disable that fucking nag. 3. I have to select "use Desktop". (Chrome's own "use Desktop site" option isn't sticky across sessions, or even tabs, AFAICT, when selected on a site-by-site basis.) And I'm finally where the fuck I wanted to be in the first fucking place. I maintain a small but fairly well-received sub, and moderate a few others. For numerous reasons, these haven't taken off or succeeded in generating much by way of active discussion (Reddit has long been an exemplar of how to design site mechanics to fully kill and destroy any active conversation). Mind, that's a hotly-contested field, but for all it does vaguely well (and yes, Reddit does have some nice features and a large and not entirely useless community), there are a few small things that could be changed to improve this ... which manifestly haven't happened. Another site I criticise heavily, Google+, actually does this fairly well, given a number of preconditions. 1. The discussion has to be actively and effectively moderated. 2. There's got to be a good, and not overly-large, discussion cohort. I find ~5-10 people is a minimum (with the right 5-10), and in rare cases, up to a few thousand probably an upper bound. The most lively conversation I saw was in a private community of about 50 people, tightly monitored for behaviour but not (with a few bounds) content. 3. The fact that a discussion stays live for an extended period of time and the Notifications loop back earlier participants is key. 4. Individual discussions can only run to 500 comments. This keeps things from running on too long. 5. Discussion is flat, not threaded. This isn't my initial choice, but it actually works ... fairly well. I'd ultimately prefer client-based determination of order, much as with Usenet or decent email (that is: Mutt) clients, including threads.[1] I'm not saying G+ is great. It has many, many, many flaws. But it is the best general-use system I've found on today's Internet, despite my many reasons for wishing that weren't the case. I've found and met some great people, and had really good conversations, many lasting days and weeks, more than a few months and years. And no, not all discussions go well. One of the best hosts on the site is its former chief architect, Yonatan Zunger. And even he has increasingly had to shut down discussions that ended up as shitshows. See: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cnqAekPSFgB https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cnqAekPSFgB The fact that Google doesn't have to crank up impressions on the service for advertising dosh probably helps. The other games the company's played for generating activity stats have quite negatively impacted it in many peoples' eyes, my own included. The G+/YouTube fiasco being the worst.[2] ________________________________ Notes: 1. Mutt offers: threaded, date, sender, and subject sorts, reversible ordering, and extensive filtering, including the ability to arbitrarily tag items and view only those. It remains hands down the best messaging tool I've ever used, though I find email almost entirely untractable for other reasons these days. 2. This ended up with the three top stories on HN on that date being either items I'd posted elsewhere being submitted here, or related fairly directly to those. Interesting experience. http://imgur.com/YgEjUuI http://imgur.com/YgEjUuI https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-16 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-16
mwambua 9y ago
Instagram's mobile site gives Reddit a good run for its money. It recently just stopped working for me... Chrome throws a "Too many redirects".
brandmeyer 9y ago
There are at least two mobile reddit interfaces, and one of them does not do this popup junk. The other one is obtained by adding the /.compact suffix, like https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact
- 333c 9y ago
  This same interface is accessible at i.reddit.com, for example, https://i.reddit.com/r/programming/ https://i.reddit.com/r/programming/
- Accacin 9y ago
  That's great when you want to browse Reddit, but often I find Reddit an actual good source for information so I'll click the link from the search engine that then takes me to the "real mobile version" which has the popup.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ according to comments works for this specific purpose. Haven't used it myself. I was hoping ublock did it but doesn't appear to. If i.reddit.com is a different IP then a hosts file entry might do it. Does pi-hole do this?
pacala 9y ago
Twitter mobile. Scroll down for a screen, full page "Log in/Sign up" popup. Every single page.
- netsharc 9y ago
  Tragically, this is most probably by design, to encourage sign-ups. Whoever implemented that should not feel any better than a telemarketer or a spammer.
  - ttctciyf 9y ago
    And then when you decide to create a sacrificial account just to keep them happy, they won't let you unless you give them your mobile number...
snailmailman 9y ago
i hate the fact that sometimes it says "continue to the mobile site" and sometimes it says "login to access the mobile site". I prefer to not be logged in. Sometimes when i visit reddit it refuses to let me use their site logged out. Its super inconsistent. When I can't use the site logged out i just give up. Also sometimes now the location of the "n comments" button becomes a "share" button, with the comments moved over to the side. but again, only sometimes. I keep clicking share on accident, because it happens infrequently enough that I haven't learned to check. I've started switching to using their .compact site, which has neither problem. Only a small "switch to the new mobile site" button at the top of the page. The thumbnails aren't as large but thats fine with me
retube 9y ago
yeah their official mobile site design is just awful. This much better tho: www.reddit.com/.compact

_jal 9y ago

It is super rude, and "giving up" is the right answer - to annoying sites. Screw them. The single nicest thing you can do for yourself after an ad blocker is to get Javascript under control. I personally am using JS Blocker, which takes too much effort, but allows you to selectively load JS. There are others - I like the control JS Blocker offers, but it is a bit annoying. This is not without problems; there are sites that don't work/don't work well. I frankly don't care about most of them, so that's fine with me, and I leak much less data to the various panty-sniffers[1]. Life is much nicer when you take back control of what runs on your machine. [1] I block FB, Google and several others' IP space, but the smaller adtech/government/who-knows surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with, and, well, defense-in-depth is the way to go.

jdironman 9y ago
How about just whitelist the good guys?
- bmurphy1976 9y ago
  That's what I do on Android, except I use Brave instead of Chrome/Firefox. I change the default settings to block all JavaScript by default, and then use the Brave button to whitelist sites I trust and actually want to use. Browsing the web (especially news sites) on my Android has gone from "a complete nightmare" to "tolerable" because of this.
  - freedomben 9y ago
    Me too. Brave gave me back the ability to browse the web on mobile. Now if I could just force pages to load in Brave instead of web view, that'd be amazing. Related tip: if you open the Google app, menu -> settings -> Accounts & privacy -> disable Open web pages in the Google app, that will fix it for google now links.
  - ttctciyf 9y ago
    Same approach, but I prefer firefox beta + noscript, which allows more fine-grained control (so I can permanently or temporarily enable js from e.g. reddit.com and redditstatic.com, but not googletagservices, amazon-adsystem, etc. .. on the same page.)

n42 9y ago

until you mentioned this I forgot reddit started doing this. at one point, I wasn't even given the option to dismiss the login modal. I had to either login or not use reddit. these ublock origin rules ended that: www.reddit.com##.splash-design www.reddit.com##.modal-open:style(overflow: visible !important)

teirce 9y ago

Also: after years of reddit not caring about email addresses, it will now nag me every time I log in to verify my email address.

cfadvan 9y ago

Giving up on Reddit is just the same response to stimulus, but the web is vast and varied. You’re giving up on a lot of good to spite a lot of bad, but you’re just going to hurt yourself. Use uNlock and uMatrix and after a few days of regular surfing and a little tweaking you won’t even realize that shite is still there.

pista 9y ago
Giving it up for work is not possible. But for entertainment it's different the gp not only mentions Reddit, but other news sites and specifically the ones linked from HN. It's a general trend that almost everybody does, probably because "everybody is doing it". There are good alternatives like reading books, watching movies or going out. Web sites are shooting themselves in their feet. Blockers end up being too much work with this arms race. They think they're "winning" when they're actually just selecting the people that can't choose.
- ttctciyf 9y ago
  I regularly browse HN and click through to articles. I run firefox / noscript on both mobile and desktop. I occasionally have to enable or temp-enable some stuff in noscript to be able to read articles, but it's a small minority of cases, and probably smaller if I wasn't so prone to temp-enabling rather than enabling. For sessions where I know I want js to "just work", like online shopping from a set of presumed-trustworthy sites, I use a different browser profile without privacy extensions, but I use it just for those purposes and avoid general browsing with it. To make multi-profile browsing simple, I theme the profiles differently, so it's obvious which one I'm in. On desktop, my launcher for firefox does --ProfileManager --new-instance and on mobile I just use different firefoxes - ff-beta and ff itself. Is this "too much work?" - I can see how it might look like that, but I've been using this system for a few years, and though it takes a few minutes to set up on a new system or device the maintenance overhead is low, so I'd say it's not "too much." Also, the time gained not waiting for js-encrusted sites to load probably outweighs the setup/maintenance by a considerable factor.
  - 9y ago

ams6110 9y ago

> Every newspaper I read has decided that autostarting video and streaming is a good idea. If you're using Firefox, go to about:config and set media.autoplay.enabled to false.

keyle 9y ago

"We use cookies on this site! Read our Cookie-policy mambo jumbo here! <dismiss>"

tempestn 9y ago
Blame the stupid EU cookie law for that though, not the sites. Cookies can actually be very user/privacy friendly, since they provide a way to retain user preferences without requiring an account to tie them to.
- fwn 9y ago
  They are also entirely voluntary - which the EU would've known if decision makers had visited their browser settings once.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The notice is only for cookies used for non-essential tasks (like analytics) and doesn't have to be shown for things like login sessions. Your browser can't distinguish between those.
    - fwn 9y ago
      The cookie notice policy led to the worst imaginable actual outcome: A state in which you either accept cookies (incl. third party) by default or you will be haunted by numbing "reminders" that cookies exist. Usually taking large parts of your small screen estate. Prior to that you could just disable them if you liked. One can say that policy makers had good intentions - certainly. However, I can not imagine a valid evaluation that wouldn't conclude this policy as failure.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        I don't disagree that the policy was a failure, I just disagree with your specific point made in the previous post.

suprfnk 9y ago

> autostarting video and streaming Super annoying. In Firefox in about:config, you can set: media.autoplay.enabled to false. That works well for me.

cornholio 9y ago
A similar setting exists in chrome where you can mute all tabs by default and only whitelist a limited number.
pista 9y ago
Some sites are using js tricks to override this setting.

LudoA 9y ago

The extension "I don't care about cookies" prevents 99% of the useless "we use cookies" pop-ups.

HugoDaniel 9y ago

You do know that this is not a "web problem". Just spend 10 minutes with your average 13yr old and see how many times they get bombed in the face with one of those interstitial ads. Also it is easier to root your phone with a malicious app than with a web page. Heck, if you are an app developer why even bother to root phones when you can just do whatever you want, after all if the user does not give you all-in permissions you won't even let the app run.

noway421 9y ago
AFAIK this is against guidelines and the app shouldn't be approved in the App Store. Not sure about Google Play

ttctciyf 9y ago

I sometimes use reddit with Firefox for Android (beta, equipped with noscript and ublock origin) and it's really not too bad like that. But overall I get a much better experience using the free, open, 3rd party app Slide ( https://www.reddit.com/r/slideforreddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slideforreddit/ ) so, maybe give that a try? (Assuming you're on Android - ios, I've no idea.)

juststeve 9y ago

no don't give up. just be in the vocal minority that gives a shit and expects better.